January Table Scraps Challenge - PINK!

 

Challenge Accepted! Mission Accomplished! My friend Joy - The Joyful Quilter - issued a challenge concurrent to the Rainbow Scraps Challenge. Each month we are to use the RSC21 color of the month to create a Table Runner, Table Topper, or Mug Rug.

As I don't have a large collection of scraps due to doing more collecting than sewing in the past few years, I decided to use the Table Scraps Challenge to generate scraps that I can then use for RSC21. Pink is not a color I use often, so I have even fewer scraps.

I quickly decided on a woven hearts block. My mother is Danish and woven hearts are a common decoration at home.

After surveying my stash, I found a self-dyed fabric from a bee gathering (which I flipped over to use the back side), a roll of hand dyed fat eights in graduated colors of pink to red, a print fabric that my father bought for me in Portugal, and a length of red/pink floral tonal the I think came in a remnants lot that I bought off eBay when I first started quilting.

I spent two evenings adding the dreaded borders. I like Wonder Clips far better than pins to hold the pieces together, though I'm still getting coordinated removing them as I sew.

I basted the quilt using Pinmoors and spent some time figuring out a quilting design. I decided to try using a Hera tool to mark the quilt as I really don't like using marking pens and didn't have time last week to do a test wash of the marker I have on my fabrics. Overall, I like the idea of the Hera tool. I need to work on better lighting around Molly so that I can actually see the lines while I sew.

I'm definitely out of practice, so my quilting is a bit wonky. But it is done and I can live with that. Let's see how it washed up.

Next step was to make the binding.  I have a nearly pristine pressing pad for bindings by June Tailor in my tool stash. I mitered my strips together and it was back to Bernadette with a walking foot to apply the binding.

I consulted several experts to refresh my memory on how to do this.

• Deb Karasik's Binding Demo - features written directions with lots of pictures.
• Sharon Schamber's Perfect Straight Binding - is what Deb based her instructions on. I turned to the YouTube video to try to figure out how to miter the ends together. Unfortuately, Sharon is using a fabric that doesn't have an obvious right side in the demo, so I turned to a third source.
• Bonnie Browning Magic Trick for Joining the Ends of Binding - which I think I found easiest to understand as she uses pins instead of glue to secure the ends.

After the binding was secured and mitered, I pressed it out and folded over, securing again with Wonder Clips.  The backing for the table runner predates my interest in quilting. I think I bought this panel (several yards of it) to use to cover a doorway, so it has been around for more than 15 years waiting for a purpose).

All done! Could be used from either side - a happy bonus. One small mishap along the way. My favorite jammie pants are now in an Oxyclean soak as I forgot to throw a color catcher in the wash. Some of the mottled solids are hand dyed, and they ran. Thankfully my jammies played the role of color catcher and saved the rest of the laundry from pinkness. Must remember this for future projects though as those pink scraps have been used in multiple blocks this month.

Happy Quilting! (Perhaps an inspiration for a future project)

Linking To:

January Table Scraps